Rainbow Puppets! Blue Pt 4 - VacuForming!

Hey reader!

I promised you a new toy this week! Again, it isn't exactly new, considering I bought it almost a year ago, but I hadn't found a good project to use it on until now. It is my very own VacuForm machine!

I was not aware of VacuForm machines outside of the SyFy series Faceoff. They are super awesome devices that allow you to sculpt something in clay or another medium, and then duplicate it in plastic! Shout out to Adam Kreutinger again for showing me that it could have an application in the world of puppets. He uses it for noses. I will probably do that eventually, but for today it is going to be used to make some horns!


The one I got is for dentists. Inside the box is the machine itself, as well as a baggy full of ball bearings. These get poured into the tray at the bottom of the device. Notice that there are small holes in the tray. Ball bearings are also small, but not as small as those holes. That is quite fortunate.

The idea is that the ball bearings allow the vacuum underneath to suck in air through them. The blue swiveling part at the top is a heat source, and the square thing under that is a tray to hold a bit of plastic. You place the plastic in the tray and lock it into place. Then you swivel the heat element over it and it heats the plastic. You carefully place the item or sculpture you want a copy of into the ball bearings at the bottom. The heating element partially melts the plastic sheeting and then you lower it over your item. As the vacuum sucks out the air, the plastic is pulled tight against the item inside and you wind up with the mold in plastic. It is super cool and makes me feel way better at this stuff than I really am.

I have had it since I was working on the Danny and Arin puppets, but I had no real use for it at the time. I decided I wanted to try making horns for this puppet, and thought the VacuForm machine would be a great tool for the job.  

Mistake 1: This machine is great at picking out the details of an item. After all, it is used to make molds of teeth for dentists so it has to be pretty accurate. I was using aluminum foil to roughly sculpt out the shape I wanted. I then wrapped the horn in duct tape, assuming that it would flatten out the foil and the machine would leave me with a pretty smooth final product. Any bumps in it would be ok because it is a horn and no one said they have to be smooth. I didn't realize just how accurate this thing is. It showed every fold in the tape, and every wrinkle in the foil. Next time I do this, I will use clay first and make sure it is smooth. I suppose if I was going to do all that, I could just attach the clay to the puppet, but that would add a lot of weight and the plastic is much less heavy to work with in a final product. In other news, look how blue my hands still are! Maybe I was wrong about that stuff being gone in a week. Certainly seems like I was blue for a while.

Anyway, the horns looked really cool. It is a bit tough to see what is happening in that picture, but if you look at the blue horn in the back you can see how it is coming together. I also kind of like how the ball bearings look after being formed in the machine. I will need to think of a way to incorporate that into something, because I don't want to waste all my plastic sheets.

I painted the inside of the horns so that nothing will ever cause the color to chip or fall off. I have seen this done a lot on FaceOff for eyes. Mistake 2: While coloring the inside does make for a better finished product, it also means if you change your mind about the color you just have to start again. Painting a new layer on the inside won't do a whole lot to change the outside color. I realized that the blue was too close to the color of the puppet, so I eventually went with gold.

We are getting near the end of the Blue puppet! I am really happy with how he is turning out, even if the color isn't quite what I was expecting. I am pretty confident that the blue arms are pulling it all together, but until some more in the series are complete I don't know how I feel yet.

Keep making cool stuff! You can do it!
Until next time,
JoshPrime